Wampum

Le Monde has this: Pour les Européens, la sécession de la Flandre reste de la politique-fiction

So what are the political fictions on this side of the pond?

How about Yucca Mountain? Its a wicked big issue in Clark County (Las Vegas), where most of the votes are, and sure everyone's nominally against the DOE's Repository, just how deeply this position is held by each candidate is a variable only those with Rad-Radar can be certain of.

Yucca isn't about commercial waste, that's just the tip of the iceberg. There's rods in pools at the former site of Maine Yankee, at Vermont Yankee, at ... and of course the operating company for each commercial reactor will eventually have to build more storage pool if Yucca isn't built ... so stopping Yucca is how we stop commercial nuclear power, right? right??

No.

Kerry got it right in the last cycle. The stockpiles of fissiles -- weaponized and mated with delivery vehicles, weaponized and not yet mated with a delivery vehicle, and fissiles not yet weaponized, they are the greatest threat to the United States -- whether they are under the custody of the United States or the Russian Federation. Rust observes princes and their pretenses not a wit, and rust will not reason.

Yucca Mountain is about either pretending there is nothing wrong, that death comes not for thee and thee and we, and happy, confident nuclear engineers can power a two car garage indefinitely into a future where no one ever has to duck and cover, or closing down the grand madness of The Cold War, and taking with it the latent threat of plutonium and highly-enriched uranium remaining in economic circulation, rather than being vitrified and down-blended, respectively, until stone cold dead.

John has the opportunity to give the speech John Kerry should have four years ago, when Bush and Nunn and Turner went for the "lone nuke" thesis -- Saddam's mushroom, putting appearances where needed (for the American psyche) in Baghdad, Tehran, and where ever the young turk of the moment at Homeland Security wants some tarting up and is willing to reach for the gold.

John has the rare chance to give the speech that Helen Caldicot would sit still for and attend on every word, every nuance. The speech that would make it plain that we'd get under a thousand in his first term, and into the low hundreds in his second. The speech that would make plain that deterrence, even massive deterrence, does not need weapons, it needs only ... the ability to fabricate weapons, mate them to delivery systems, and retaliate. A speech that North America is a submarine, it is the survivable element of the triad, and therefore that no weapons are necessary to deter. Any who strike, will eventually be counter-struck, and that certainty, not any present weapon, let alone two vast heaps of aging weapons and one decaying command and control system, is sufficient to ensure the peace. A speech that we're safer without weapons, not because of the Soviets, but simply because of rust, and the things men and women do in fear and panic.

Nevada isn't about the Strip. It isn't about the Clark County housing market out-plunging the San Diego County housing market. Nevada is about the test site and all of its sequela. The long tail, that runs from lung cancer clusters in uranium miners in Dinétah to the down-winders in Saint George, all the way through the pit facilities in the weapons labs to the cheery nuclear nutmen who promise cheap, unlimited electrical power and carefully managed waste.

Nevada's a pretty sane place, the Strip and the overwrought newcomers who fill I-15 each weekend excepted. This evening Jonah asked me for a fire, so I burned some of the wood we picked up in Panaca.

The smell of ceder smoke has heightened my memory of place.